Mark,

Where are you updating the stored value? I have used this a few times and have not seen any impact on scalability but it may not have been under a big enough load. The statement as I posted it gets in and out of the table very quickly so I am not sure what kind of concurrency problems you might be referring to. Please give us a little more detail before I use this again!

Scott,

I like your idea as well. It wouldn't be hard to create a job that ran at the beginning of every year to reset the seed and increment of the identity column. The only downside (very minor imo) would be that you can't put any non-numeric characters in the field itself.